It's kinda weird because you somehow intuitively know which gender it's gonna be, it's got to have some pattern to it in some way. I think it comes down to sounds, "la/une table" vs "le/un table", "le/un bureau" vs "la/une bureau". Except when we decide fuck it we'll just say "l'amour", "l'argent" so it's like, only tangible things can be gendered but also intangible things inherently sound weird if you do try to slap a "le/un" or "la/une" before it, so like the whole sound of the word somewhat carries its gender? Things in "-ette" are pretty much always female.

The more you think about it the weirder it gets with exceptions and edge cases.

Who looked at a desk, or a spoon and thought “ah, that’s a ‘she’, then looked at a door and said ‘yep, definitely a ‘he’ right there…”

Thinking about it, it sounds about right. If I were to name a thing, I'd probably just pick what sounds best kinda like you'd name a pet or baby except you're not constrained to a gender.

I'd definitely enjoy a good read on how the fuck we ended up there. It seems to affect most romance languages so it's gotta go way back. I think the genders are mostly matched with spanish too, like, tables are also female in spanish iirc.